Let's start the year off on the right foot by proposing some good news. What if all the dire warnings about the lack of retirement readiness are wrong? “Ridiculous!” you say? With a 2016 study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) saying the mean retirement savings is only $5,000 and with Aon-Hewitt's much quoted “85 percent salary replacement ratio,” it's easy to see how there might be a retirement crisis.

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But if we drill down those numbers, we begin to see a different picture. First, what the EPI really emphasizes is the number of people who haven't saved much for retirement. In other words, the reason why that $5,000 is so low lies in the number of people who have no retirement savings at all. If we only include those who have retirement savings, the mean explodes up to $60,000. Sure that's not much, and neither is the average retirement savings of $95,776 (which, again, includes families with no retirement savings), but it's not exactly nothing. And that “not nothing” is something of an advantage for retirement savers—good news for them at least.

That still leaves us with a chunk of people who have saved nothing. Here the math gets a little trickier (it involves percentages, not real dollar figures).

Let's start with Aon-Hewitt's famous 85 percent salary replacement ratio number. First off, that's a bit on the high side compared to the 80 percent replacement ratio figure that's more often used. In reality, both of those numbers are huge, especially when you compare them to the salary replacement ratio of Social Security. Even when using a claiming strategy that maximizes the benefit, Social Security will replace only 65 percent of the salary for someone earning $30,000.

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The Social Security salary replacement ratio gets much lower as one's salary increases. For example, for someone earning $60,000, Social Security replaces only 40 percent of one's salary. For a salary of $120,000 a year, Social Security replaces a mere 25 percent. Well, at least the good news for those earning $120,000 a year is that they can probably save an above average amount for retirement.

But wait! There's more!

We're looking at salary replacement ratios in the dark. We haven't yet offered any meaningful comparables. Aon-Hewitt derives their numbers by looking at the averages across geographies and lifestyles. What if we instead look at the raw data from specific locations, namely, the “20 Best Affordable Places to Live in the U.S.” according to US News. In those 20 cities, the average percentage of income spent on living expenses is only 28 percent. In fact, there's very little variance in this figure, as the highest percentage resides at just a hair over 29 percent. That means, even for those earning $120,000, Social Security offers enough income to cover these living expenses.

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Not everyone wants to spend their retirement traveling the world. Many prefer just to stay home and relax. The good news is, Social Security offers the chance for most people to do precisely that.